OREANDA-NEWS. September 21, 2012. GE’s (NYSE: GE) TrueSense* Online for Cooling Technology has joined the company’s ecomagination portfolio, receiving ecomagination-qualification status. Ecomagination is GE’s commitment to providing innovative solutions that maximize resources, drive efficiencies and help make the world work better.

GE’s TrueSense Online for Cooling is the first integrated platform to directly measure and control the applied chemistries critical for managing cooling water efficiency and preserving key assets in industrial cooling systems. Using the TrueSense Online for Cooling platform in industrial cooling systems also can reduce water and chemical consumption compared to conventional methods for cooling water management.

At one metals processing plant using GE's GenGard* water treatment chemicals, with a recirculation rate of 9,800 gallons per minute, the TrueSense Online for Cooling platform enabled the reduction of annual chemical consumption by 19 percent or 0.4 metric tons and lowered annual freshwater costs by USD 50,000.

“TrueSense Online takes measurement and control technology for multiple analytes to the next level—with a single detection platform that offers simplicity, stability and easy installation,” said Adnan Mansour, global product line leader, monitoring solutions—Water & Process Technologies for GE Power & Water. “The ability to do this gives owners and operators of cooling systems the confidence to push the controllable variables of cooling water management and that creates a new vision for what optimized can mean.”

GE employs a rigorous review and qualification process for all products and services included in the ecomagination portfolio. The ecomagination Product Review (ePR) process ensures that offerings significantly and measurably improve customers' operating performance or value proposition and environmental performance. GreenOrder, an LRN advisory group focused on sustainability strategy, verifies the offerings’ claims.

“When it comes to conserving fresh water, you can do so by increasing cycles of concentration, using alternatives to fresh water or both. Those alternatives can be recycled or reused waters that previously would have been deemed as having too much technical risk,” said Mansour.

Operating Benefits

GE's TrueSense Online for Cooling platform helps to maintain the heat-exchange efficiencies and integrity of capital assets while reducing total operating costs for water and chemicals compared to conventional control methods. The technology was designed to provide a direct measurement of the functional chemistries that drive success for all three dimensions of successful cooling water management. This means optimum dosing of available polymer, soluble orthophosphate and free halogen, based on the specific conditions of a given cooling system. TrueSense ensures that the required polymer concentration always is maintained despite fluctuations in demand that result from system variations in stress that consume the applied polymer. Maintaining adequate soluble orthophosphate in the system is critical to ensuring effective steel corrosion inhibition. TrueSense technology achieves this by actually measuring both soluble and insoluble orthophosphate and automatically monitors their difference. Polymer addition is then automatically adjusted to maintain the difference to an acceptable level such that the corrosion protection is not compromised and phosphate is not lost to the formation of insulating deposits on heat transfer surfaces.

Environmental Benefits

GE's TrueSense Online for Cooling platform directly measures and controls the applied chemistries of phosphate, polymers and chlorine that protect key assets in industrial cooling systems from steel corrosion, deposition and microbiological growth. This precise control allows customers to operate at elevated cycles of concentration, a measure of how concentrated minerals become in the cooling water, reducing the overall freshwater requirement compared to conventional control methods. Using the TrueSense Online for Cooling platform in a representative industrial cooling system with GE's GenGard water treatment chemicals and a recirculation rate of 50,000 gallons per minute could increase the cycles of concentration to result in savings of more than 118 million gallons of water per year, equivalent to the average annual water withdrawal of 890 U.S. households.